COLOMBE, Michel
(b. ca. 1430, d. 1512, Tours)

St George and the Dragon

1508
Marble, 128 x 182 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Michel Colombe was born about 1430 in Bourges, into a family of stone-carvers and illuminators. Active in Tours, where he died about 1515, he is the greatest master of the Loire valley, where artistic production enjoyed a tremendous boon as a result of the court's presence in that district.

In his later years in Tours he executed a bas-relief depicting St George, commissioned by Cardinal Georges d'Amboise for the chapel at Gaillon (Eure). An Italianate frame was carved by Jerome Pacherot, a Genoese sculptor. Colombe treated the legendary episode realistically, placing it in an acutely observed landscape offering no concessions to the fanciful or to the picturesque. In this relief we find stronger traces of Italian influence than are usual in Colombe. Iconographically it goes back to various reliefs of the subject produced by the Gaggini family in Genoa. Colombe, however, does not slavishly imitated the Italian work. In the latter the landscape is treated in a schematic manner, with the rocks reduced to geometrical forms, whereas Colombe has rendered with great care every incident of rock, pebble, or plant. Moreover, his dragon is entirely his own, with a Gothic combination of imagination and homeliness.




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